Attitudes toward Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers: The role of false beliefs and other social-psychological variables

Abstract

Australia has a long and chequered history regarding relations between different cultural groups. Indigenous, Asian, Yugoslav, Italian and Arabic Australians have all suffered from negativity directed toward them by “mainstream” Australia. At the beginning of the 21st century there has been much publicity about two groups: Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers. In this paper, we examine community attitudes toward these two groups, in particular the role of false beliefs in such attitudes. We then set out both the similarities and differences in these two highly related sets of attitudes, and conclude that Australia would appear not to be as accepting of a multi-cultural society as we sometimes believe, and on which we often pride ourselves. There are many social-psychological and structural issues related to negative attitudes toward Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers; much work needs to be carried out to address these.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully thank our research assistant Deborah Hunn for her work in relation to this project. We also thank Kathryn Choules, Helen Maddocks and Alex Main for their very useful comments on an earlier draft (although the authors take full responsibility for the views stated herein). Finally, we thank the Brisbane City Council from whose idea this paper was generated (a version of this paper was given at Ideas at the Powerhouse, Brisbane, Queensland, 14 – 17 August 2003). Some ideas generated from the audience at that conference were used in this paper.

Notes

1 We acknowledge that some people argue it is not useful to make distinctions between “truth” and “falsity”; beliefs being opinions held that do not necessarily bear any relationship to facts or proof. For example, “truth” or “falsity” may be hard to ascertain, and ideologies can serve to legitimise inequality regardless of their truth/falsity (Sidanius et al., 2001). We believe, however, that there are certain societal beliefs that are factually incorrect and which may serve to legitimise inequality. In other words, there are some beliefs that can be verified (falsified) by making the appropriate investigations (e.g. that the moon is comprised of green cheese). We therefore use this label in line with past research (e.g. Pedersen et al., in press).

2 After the writing of this article, there has been some change at an institutional/government level. In particular, Victorian backbench MP Petro Georgiou and some Liberal colleagues threatened to introduce a Private Members Bill in 2005 in an attempt to soften the Government's hard line stance on asylum seekers. After negotiations between the Government the “Liberal Rebels”, it would appear that the detention centres are slowly emptying. This would not have occurred without these like-mined individuals and groups taking action.